Houses get stripped of their wiring during construction. Ground wires get stripped off of power poles. The wire between light poles and going up the poles get stolen.

It’s not new though. Back in the 70’s a place that made modular power stations had tons of copper stolen. A inside job. They used one of the forklifts there to load up a company truck. I’ve worked on jobs where copper ground wire was stolen. That’s one of the easiest thing to get.

we were looking at.

Pretty common actually. The house we ended up buying had most of it's wiring stolen but that was okay, when we bought a place finally, we wanted to mostly gut/rehab it (which we did), so 90% of all the wiring was redone, along w/ a new electric box (having 3 total). I felt much better w/ that, than the original box, which everything was loaded out of it to begin w/ (so we shifted lots of loads to the other two boxes, just for safety's sake.

That's one reason why I'm glad I know a little about electric, so I can wire, etc. (but not the box itself, leave that to the experts).

I've had to delay trips and get into slow buses while international lines were down because organized thieves stole the copper cables that let the trains zip between Köln-Aachen-Brussels. They pick times of night when traffic is slow, and dismantle tons of copper cable lines at a time. These are organized bands from Eastern Europe and/or North Africa who shoot back, so German cops don't like dealing with them. Hand-wringing the morning after is deemed much safer. To deflect and swerve, as it were.

Not really, but that money is literally coming out of our pockets (via taxes whatever).

No wonder they are trying to develop wireless modes of hauling electric current. You see this in some phones able to recharge themselves now, perhaps one day, eh?

I'd be very apprehensive of living anywhere near a place where thousand of volts of electricity were being zapped through the area instead of being delivered by underground wire cables. I don't know if there is such a thing as "electricity pollution," but if the instances of tumors and brain cancer triple in the area, it might be a good place to move away from until the technology is made safe.

but I don't agree. Heck, w/ my hearing aids on, and I have them turned to the phone option (to hear on telephones), and I get too close to power being emitted, e.g., like embedded in a wall, I can hear the hum of the electric line in the wall! So, there is electro magnetic charges there, being emitted by the live wires.

There was probably a good reason users of high-powered cell phones were said to suffer from high percentages of brain tumors, though I don't know how good the statistics were that backed that up.

companies have probably poured in tons of money to fight such charges / claims that power cables are somewhat dangerous, need to be shielded.

Large scale manufacturers of anything don't want to be informed about (much less held responsible for) dangerous and possibly fatal consequences from the use of whatever it is they make.

(oh, the doors tend to fly off our planes in mid-flight? here's some extra masking tape, just in case!)

Hat tip, a mailing list I'm on.

At times the stories about the theft of copper wire includes the news that the thief was electrocuted.